The Objective Standard Blog

Friday, April 3, 2009

Does My Child Know Grammar Better Than Me?

Posted by Lisa VanDamme at 12:52 pm

I would say that a debate is raging in our culture over whether or not we need to preserve the formal rules of grammar, but the sad truth is that there are too few defenders of grammar for a debate to rage. I am lonely in my fervency. Nevertheless, a few recent books and articles have brought the dispute between grammar snobs and grammar slobs to the fore.

Pundit of punctuation Lynne Truss tried to rally readers to her "zero tolerance approach to punctuation" with her bestseller Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Alas, Birmingham, England didn’t heed the call. In January, the city council abolished apostrophes from street signs, inviting criticism from pro-grammar organizations like the "Apostrophe Protection Society," and from our own students at VanDamme Academy, who condemned the decision in a paper written for Mrs. Battaglia’s (or "Mrs. Battaglias," if we follow the Birmingham precedent) writing class. "If children grow up there, they will learn not to put apostrophes in possessive words," said 8-year-old Greta. "Usually kids learn from their surroundings."

This debate has also been given center stage unwittingly by President Obama. Obama, widely praised as a consummate intellectual, has been criticized by advocates of grammar for committing such common blunders as the inversion of "me" and "I."

In a February New York Times op-ed, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman echoed the sentiments of many Americans when they defended President Obama against the "grammar junkies," claiming that the rules for pronouns are 19th-century creations that have no necessity in reality.

Really?

To illustrate my answer, I brought the following example into my Room 4 grammar class. Rather than the innocuous, "President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I," what if President Obama had said, "Michelle likes President Bush better than I." Is this a mere difference of opinion about the former President, or a scandal? The ambiguity is resolved with a universal understanding of the rules of grammar.

"Michelle likes him better than I," as my grammar students can tell you, contains an elliptical adverb clause with "I" as the subject, and means, "Michelle likes him better than I like him." On the other hand, "Michelle likes him better than me," contains an elliptical clause with "me" as the direct object, and means, "Michelle likes him better than she likes me."

So, if you whose children are gaining a thorough mastery of the rules of grammar have ever asked yourselves, "Does my child know grammar better than me?" the answer is no, he should know you better. And by the time he graduates, he will know better than to ask the question like that.

Follow this link for the latest VanDamme Academy Newsletter, which features this article and more.

Posted in: Education

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Life After VanDamme Academy

Posted by Lisa VanDamme at 6:38 pm

The following is an interview with Evan Storms, a VanDamme Academy graduate currently in the process of applying to college. Perhaps my favorite part of the interview was his answer to my request for the interview itself: "Considering what I gained from your school, I would write a doctoral thesis for you if you needed it; but I can settle for the interview."

When did you attend VanDamme Academy?

I attended VanDamme Academy for two-and-a-half years from 2003 to 2005, from sixth to eighth grade.

Where had you gone to school prior to that, and how did your experience there differ from your time at VDA?

Before VanDamme Academy, I attended a reputedly exceptional public elementary school in Laguna Hills. My education there differed from my experience at VanDamme fundamentally. Where VanDamme offered a logically-structured, ordered curriculum, my elementary education consisted of unconnected lessons seemingly chosen at random; science would cover volcanoes one week, and the anatomy of a frog the next.

Where do you attend high school, and what have been the strengths and weaknesses of your experience there?

I attend Fairmont Preparatory Academy in Anaheim. Academically, the school is, to the best of my knowledge, the strongest in the area. Fairmont offers a wide range of AP and otherwise advanced courses, generally taught by knowledgeable teachers who present their material clearly and logically.

Moreover, the school allows considerable academic freedom; it has, for example, allowed me to create my own independent study philosophy course, and has created two new math classes so that I can continue to advance. The number of intellectually ambitious students at the school, however, is small. And despite the strengths of the higher level courses, the curriculum in general emphasizes memorization over understanding, with the widespread use of multiple-choice testing and the heavy reliance on textbooks.

What have been some of your most important achievements since your time at VanDamme Academy?

Since attending VanDamme Academy, I have excelled in every facet of my academics: I have earned nearly perfect grades, taken and earned fives on eight AP exams, and been recognized as a national merit scholarship finalist.

Where have you applied to college, and why?

Though I applied to many schools, I am only sincerely interested in attending two: Duke and Stanford University. Both schools offer strong general academic programs, so that, whichever course of study I ultimately choose, I will be able to study under a first-class department.

How do you think your experience at VanDamme Academy shaped you?

At VanDamme Academy, I gained the foundations of an independent mind. I learned that ideas have consequences, are important, and are worth pursuing. I learned to think logically, to allow myself no half-formed knowledge or superficial understanding. I learned to appreciate great literature, to analyze facts scientifically, to write with clarity. And I learned that the sublime is possible to the man who thinks.

Posted in: Education

Thursday, October 9, 2008

‘A Pygmalion of the Soul’

Posted by Lisa VanDamme at 3:44 pm

"It is a beautiful thing to mold a statue and give it life; it is more beautiful to shape an intelligence and give it truth." —Victor Hugo

The first work of literature read in Room 4 this year was Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw. The musical My Fair Lady was based upon this classic play.

Pygmalion is the story of a lowly flower girl who is invited into the home of a brilliant phonetician after he makes a bet that he can teach her the elegance and speech of a proper English lady and pass her off as a duchess at a garden party.

In the play’s most comical scene, a favorite among the students, Eliza, the flower girl, ventures into society for the first time. Having been told to confine her conversation to the benign and inoffensive topics of weather and health, she discusses, with the utmost elegance of manners and articulation, her suspicion that her aunt who had allegedly died from influenza had actually been murdered over a hat. And so begins a comedy of errors, in which, as Higgins the phonetician says, the problem is not "how" she says things but "what" she says.

With more training, Eliza learns to curb her coarse speech, and she becomes thoroughly polished, dignified, and charming. Her debut at the garden party is a smashing and unmitigated success. She has become a proper English lady.

But in the last and most important scene of the play, we discover that though she has learned to be a lady, she has not yet learned to be a human being—an independent, self-sufficient individual with her own judgment and her own sense of self worth. She has learned how to conform to the standards of elite society, but she has not learned how to form her own standards.

It is only when she drops her decorum and stands up self-confidently against Higgins that he says, "By George Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have."

Because for Higgins (and for Shaw), the mark of a worthy person is not conformity to the standards of the upper classes. Rather, a worthy person is one who has-in my favorite expression of the play—his "own soul," his "own spark of divine fire."

Teaching the play this time, it struck me as metaphorical for my own view of education.

Just as Eliza was taught in a way that allowed her to be passed off as a duchess at a garden party, the best of schools today teach children in a way that allows them to be passed off as educated at a cocktail party. But have they learned to be independent, self- sufficient, clear thinking, passionate human beings? Have they gained their own "spark of divine fire"?

That is our goal at VanDamme Academy. Our aim is not to teach the children a stock set of facts that will make them culturally literate. Our aim is to empower them with the lessons of history, to equip them with the tools of math and science, to provide them the fuel and inspiration of literature—to endow them with the wisdom that will give them the means to live the life of a rational, happy, efficacious human being.

That is why the following were highlights of my week.

First, when Room 4 read that last act of Pygmalion, we came to a scene in which Higgins calls Eliza a fool and she responds that the comment is "not proper." I put down the play and asked the class what Higgins’s response to that would be. 11-year-old Taylor’s bright eyes became incandescent with understanding and her hand shot in the air. "He would say he doesn’t care what’s proper!" In that moment, she had not just grasped something deeply important about the character, she had grasped something about Shaw’s philosophic perspective on life. She had understood that Shaw cares little for conformity to social standards. And her expression revealed that that kind of understanding was thrilling.

Second, I was stopped in the hall one afternoon this week by the mother of a 7-year-old girl named Emily. She told me that Emily had related to her a story from her book Adventures of the Greek Heroes. Emily told her mother the tragic tale of Admetus the king and his true love Alcestis. Admetus was dying, and the gods declared that if he were to remain with his love, someone would have to die in his place. Admetus went to his loyal subjects, his soldiers, his servants, then even to his own parents, but all feared to die for him. Finally, in a tragic twist, his own dear Alcestis, the love for whom he wanted to live, gave her life for his. As 7-year-old Emily shared the story, her voice became halting, and her mother noticed that she had tears in her eyes. (And as her mother told me this story, both she and I both had tears in ours.)

Our goal at VanDamme Academy is not to produce students who are refined, polished, and superficially educated. It is to produce students who are thoughtful, passionate, and sincerely educated.

My favorite author, Victor Hugo, has a passage in which he describes the role of a teacher. He says, "It is a beautiful thing to mold a statue and give it life; it is more beautiful to shape an intelligence and give it truth." And he captures this whole metaphor in an exquisitely poetic description, calling a teacher "a Pygmalion of the soul."

Follow this link for the latest VanDamme Academy Newsletter, which features the above article.

Posted in: Education

Friday, September 26, 2008

Math Magic

Posted by Lisa VanDamme at 6:43 pm

Most math curricula are an absolute pedagogical mess.

I have long known that math programs treat children like human calculators, programming them with processes they use to input numbers and churn out results. But this became poignantly clear to me when I tried to teach my daughter long division this summer.

Confronted with a problem such as 2,832 divided by 8, I began my "explanation," hearkening back to the process that had been drilled into me in third grade. "8 goes into 28 how many times? 3. So you write a 3 above the 8. 8 times 3 is 24. Subtract 24 from 28 and you get 4. Then bring down the 3. 8 goes into 43 how many times?…" and so on. At the conclusion of my presentation, she said something simple but telling: "That is going to be a lot for me to remember."

Indeed, it is a lot for her to remember, because she is remembering, and not understanding.

If you want to grasp the poverty of your own education in math, I offer you the following challenge: explain long division. Explain it to a child, to an adult, to yourself—but really explain it. Use words to describe not the process, but the reason for the process: why each number goes where it does; why you subtract, or divide, or bring down; why the process works. It won’t be easy. I maintain that if you had been educated properly in math, it would be.

One of the defining principles of the VanDamme method is a concerted effort to ensure that every item of knowledge possessed by the child is true knowledge, to ensure that he understands it thoroughly, independently, conceptually. To realize this goal in math will require a total overhaul of the standard curriculum. It will require that someone strip the program down to essentials, arrange the material with total faithfulness to hierarchy, and design assessments that are true tests of the child’s understanding.

Meanwhile, we can take moderate steps in that direction, by requiring, for example, that the children give complete, verbal explanations for all that they do in math.

Mr. Steele, VanDamme Academy math teacher for a group of 7 & 8-year-olds, demands of his students that they not just blurt out answers, or crank through mechanical processes. He makes them explain the processes using the proper terminology and demonstrating that they understand what they are doing and why.

If, for example, he is teaching subtraction with borrowing, and puts a problem on the board such as 2700 – 350, someone in the class will invariably ask, "Can I just tell you the answer?" Mr. Steele’s answers are charming—and pedagogically correct.

Sometimes he says, "I don’t want you to do ‘magic math.’ I don’t want you stare up at the sky, come up with a number, and blurt it out to the class. That doesn’t help us understand, and that doesn’t show me that you understand. I want you to explain how you arrived at your answer."

At other times, he says, "Let’s play a game called ‘Mr. Steele bumped his head and can’t remember math.’ Don’t just give me the answer, teach me the process by which you arrived at your answer."

The students proceed with explanations that demand, among other things, that they use concepts of place value (if they begin the problem above by saying, "0 minus 0 is 0," he says, "That’s true," and waits for them to tell him that you put a 0 in the ones’ place before he writes a 0 on the board), and that they explain what they are doing when they borrow (if they say, "Cross out the 5 and put a 4, and put a 10 in the tens’ place," he will ask, "What does that 10 represent? 10 what? 10 monkeys?" which will make them giggle and offer the correction, "10 tens silly!").

These children are not treated like human calculators, they are treated like thinking beings. And when they truly grasp the concepts they are using, when they can explain them fully and articulately, when they retain them because they are not memorizing, but understanding—that is real math magic.

Posted in: Education

Thursday, April 24, 2008

An Interview with Lisa VanDamme on Education and Objectivism

Posted by Craig Biddle at 1:28 pm

Michael F. Shaughnessy, a senior columnist for Education News, has published a wonderful interview with Lisa VanDamme. Here are the first two questions and answers:

1)  Lisa, first of all, what got you interested in education and teaching?

From one perspective, you could say I stumbled upon my career as a school owner and director; in another sense it is the perfect harmony of my lifelong interests.

The "chance" element came in 1996, when I had just graduated with a degree in philosophy and was contacted (through mutual friends) by some families in California who were fed up with traditional schools and were seeking a private teacher for their children. I came home one day to a message on my answering machine informing me of this unusual opportunity.

I very quickly became enthusiastic about the prospect: I would be given the opportunity to educate children as they might and ought to be educated, entirely unlike I had been educated in public schools, and as I had been attempting to educate myself as an adult. I interviewed, was hired, and packed my bags to begin the adventure.

I can only describe those early years of home-schooling as a magical experience. The children were wildly enthusiastic about learning: with my guidance, they became logical, articulate and eager writers; they devoured classics of world literature and learned to appreciate them with intellectual sophistication and deep emotion; they progressed to the limit of their capability rather than being held back by classmates; etc.—and, as it might and ought to be, they sincerely loved to learn.

I was convinced that the principles that made that home-school experience so "magical" could be translated into a school environment. So, in 2001 my ex-husband and I started VanDamme Academy, a school dedicated to giving children a real education. The school was to provide all that—and only that—which was necessary to help the children mature into informed, thoughtful, rational, life-loving adults. Rather than endless, fill-in-the-bubble busywork, rather than agenda-laden discussions of current events, rather than classes on everything from cooking to citizenship to clay making, rather than countless play-days meant to make the supposed drudgery of learning palatable, we would just educate them, in the core curriculum. That has been my ever-improving goal for the last ten years.

Though in a sense I stumbled upon my career, with that out-of-the-blue call from California, it is the perfect integration of my love of children and my passion for philosophy. I have the opportunity to contemplate, research, write about, and then apply my most deeply held philosophic convictions to the proper education of children, and then the joy of observing the results in year after year of students.

2) Who has influenced you?

The greatest influence on my philosophic views broadly was the philosopher Ayn Rand, and the greatest influence on my educational philosophy was Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir and the father of one of my first students.

I discovered Ayn Rand in college and was awed by her philosophic insights, which, in contrast to all I had learned in my philosophy classes, made sense, were consistent with my life experiences, gave new order and intelligibility to the world around me, and identified rational principles by which I could guide my actions in order to live a fulfilled and joyful life.

I learned from Ayn Rand both the importance of having a philosophy to guide your life, and what a rational, life-affirming philosophy would look like.

Leonard Peikoff’s course "Philosophy of Education" applied Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism to educational theory, and it is that course which has been the most formative influence of my career. The course identified a proper definition of "education," explaining the basic necessity and purpose of education. It identified the principles that define which courses a good education should comprise, and the basic methodology that should be followed in teaching those courses.

It contrasted a rational approach to education with that of other historical movements in education, such as Dewey’s progressive method and Prussian education. It showed me, in essence, what had been wrong with my own education and how to redeem education for my students.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted in: Education